Chocolate Chip Cookies

Recipe #66: Page 766-767 in the 75th anniversary edition of the Joy of Cooking. Yep, you'll have to look it up the old-school way, on paper.

Well, some days you just need something familiar to cheer you up so I figured a day of snow and cold temperatures would be a good time to make a familiar recipe for chocolate chip cookies. My mom makes these for my dad on occasion so I asked her for the recipe. Turns out it's in my very own copy of the Joy of Cooking that I got for Christmas in 2009.

I didn't really do much in the way of substitution for this recipe. That's not as easy in baking as it can be in cooking, or so I'm learning. The only thing I did differently was use Splenda in lieu of the (white) sugar called for.

I always thought this recipe would take a long time to make, but it's pretty quick. I'm glad I was wrong. My mom said she usually doubles it but since I'm not making mine for the masses, I used the original quantities. The book says it yields about 36 2.5 inch cookies.... I got 18 obese ones.

That reminds me of the time my best friend and I made this recipe in a fit of domesticity when we were young. She's always been better in the kitchen whereas I'm the better reader, but somehow between the two of us, we overlooked the fact that these are "drop" cookies, and we carefully flattened each of ours before chucking them in the oven. We ended up with two giant cookies pretty much the exact dimensions of our cookie sheets...

In truth and in fact, I prefer these cookies when my mom makes them. Hers are probably the proper size which means the middles aren't thick and almost not-quite-baked-enough like mine. Hers are a bit crisper overall too. If you like big, soft, chewy chocolate chip cookies, then by all means use their "heaping teaspoon" measurement literally like I did when dumping them on the cookie pans. Otherwise, maybe you'd better ask her what she does differently. Mine are still edible but things taste better when they're made by a mom with love.